Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Myelin supports rapid and efficient neural communication and is implicated in brain development, learning, aging, and neurological disease. Although numerous magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) approaches have been proposed to characterize myelin in vivo, they have rarely been evaluated together within the same participants and across repeated acquisitions. To address these gaps, we introduce the Myelin Imaging Reliability and ReprOducibility Resource (MIRROR), an openly available multimodal test– retest MRI dataset of diffusion MRI (dMRI), inhomogeneous magnetization transfer imaging (ihMT), quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM), MP2RAGE, T 1 w/T 2 w ratio mapping, and transverse relaxometry in 22 healthy adults. We evaluated gray–white matter differentiation, intermetric correspondence, test–retest reliability, and participant specificity across 27 myelin-sensitive metrics. Gray–white matter differentiation was strong for dMRI derivatives, MP2RAGE-derived R 1 , T 1 w/T 2 w, and ihMT, while being substantially weaker for QSM measures. Intermetric spatial correlations were generally strongest within acquisition or modeling families. Test–retest reliability was generally high, particularly for dMRI-derived metrics, but was more variable among QSM-, ihMT-, and R 2 *-derived measures. Regional spatial profiles were also highly participant-specific, with discriminability approaching its upper bound for most metrics. All imaging data, derived maps, and processing code are openly released. MIRROR provides a benchmark for characterizing the measurement properties and practical tradeoffs of scalable myelin-sensitive MRI methods, supporting principled acquisition selection and accelerating methodological development and validation.
Authors: Steven L. Meisler, Taylor Salo, Matthew Cieslak, Brooke L. Sevchik, Juliette Brook, Guillaume Duhamel, Olivier M. Girard, Bart Larsen, Shraddha Pandey, Lucinda M. Sisk, Lucas Soustelle, Valerie J. Sydnor, Poljanka Johnson, David R. Roalf, Russell T. Shinohara, Manuel Taso, M. Dylan Tisdall, Theodore D. Satterthwaite
Language: English
Subfield: Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
Awards: Postdoctoral Fellowship: SPRF: Characterizing Links Between Childhood Environment and Cortical Neuroplasticity Across Adolescence, Psychosis: A Convergent Neuroscience Perspective, Normative and Quantitative Framework for Brain Tissue Damage Characterization at High & Ultra-High Field MRI, Inter-modal Coupling Image Analytics, Linking the Development of Association Cortex Plasticity to Trans-Diagnostic Psychopathology in Youth, Child & Adolescent Mental Health Research
OpenAlex ID: W7215107480